: personally, i think tau is a brilliant thinker, with reams of
: useful and esoteric knowledge to be shared with us.
: granted, my intellect isnt sufficiently formed to
: adequately follow the meandering courses of his narratives,
: but thats my problem, not his, and therefore i feel there
: is no reason to ban him.

Not looking to reopen a can of worms - it's all moot at this point anyway - and not looking to be contentious or argumentative either; just using your post as a handy place to hang my own thoughts about this, "for the record":

I'd agree tau has exhibited evidence of some unusual insights. We don't know whether he came to them on his own, or whether he was given them by someone else.

Whether the knowledge qualifies as "esoteric": maybe so.

Whether it qualifies as truly useful, however, has been one of the problems - for most of us, who don't quite know what it is tau has been rambling on about, the utility of all those words remains very, very questionable, today.

I'm a little concerned that a number of us formed an opinion that seems to say, "Because his thoughts are too [something] for my little brain to follow, why, he must be smarter than the rest of us!"

Someone said, "If I can't follow his thinking, that's my problem." Personally, no - I don't think it is your problem (whoever that was). "Esoteric" is one thing. "Obtuse" is another. And tau's writing style, most of the time, has been the very definition of obtuse.

Some years ago I shared a house with some friends. One weekend one of them went to some sort of Neuro-Linguistic Programming seminar. When he returned, without asking me he tried his newly learned skills on me.

I was able to _feel_ it when he did this, and soon told him in no uncertain terms to knock it off - no one's mind is someone else's playground, and it is at the very least enormously rude to behave otherwise.

This left me very concerned over NLP, however, and the potential for mischief and misuse regarding it. I was sort of subliminally aware of its being used on me - it was something I might've missed noticing if the practitioner in question had been more skilled at what he was doing; and possibly, _other_ people could've been manipulated even by the half-baked skills of this novice. I gotta wonder, then, whether more-skilled practitioners are playing with my mind, our minds, in ways I have _not_ had any awareness of at all, yet.

tau's writings have had perhaps not that same effect but a similar one, in my experience. We're all trained (from school, from media) to "go into receive mode when the teacher is speaking". There's something right about doing that - but we shouldn't be surrendering our thinking and fully suspending our disbelief when we do it.

Personally I find tau's writings not brilliant, but hypnotic, hypnotizing, mesmerizing, both in content and in form. The content flits here and flits there, doubles back on itself, and contains pepperings of references to a myriad of traditions, plus the occasional "Amen". :)

Not only do the contents double back on themselves, but so do the language constructs - both the ideas and the sentences made of them spiral-in and spiral-out, like a writhing snake, coiling and uncoiling in upon itself.

The net effect of that is to tire the mind of the reader.

The mind has a reasonable expectation that there will be some logical connection from one thought to the next - and that those connections will include 'referents' to people, places, things or events that most of the readers will already be familiar with - or else appropriate explanations for those people, places, things or events will be given along the way.

Reading tau's writings is like being a congregant, held fast for the duration of a sermon being given by a mad preacher - it's full of lightning and thunder, but no or little "common ground" from which to get one's bearings. The reader is left with no choice but to either "hang on" or go away.

The mind, finding all the referents strange and not resonant with previously acquired bits of knowledge that are stored in one's subconscious "library" of knowledge, GIVES UP, and places itself into the control of the authoritative-sounding preacher/speaker, to be wafted along on the _rhythms_ of his language - and while on that floating dream excursion, "seeds" of ideas are able to slip past the conscious mind 'guardian', and get directly into the subconscious mind (where the power is) - just as my housemate had learned he could do, using techniques of NLP.

But the crucial question would be: Was this something tau was doing, deliberately and consciously? I really don't know.

If it wasn't deliberate, wasn't consciously crafted for some purpose, why was he writing in that fashion? Was he the _object_ of some influence, that produced this effect in his writing - was he a 'tool' of someone else? Again, I really don't know.

Or, was he entering some sort of trance-like state, in order to make these mental connections of events that he was making, and the language that was coming from him in that state simply lacked structures he would use in a more un-trance state? I have no idea.

What I do know is that tau is _capable_ of writing clearly - he wrote a reply to one of my posts in the past few days, that was _not_ coiling and slithery, but was quite "normal" and clear to understand. The difference was distinct enough that it made me wonder if "tau" is a group of writers, not just one person - or if conceivably "tau" is one person with more than one personality. Maybe we'll never know.

These are my thoughts, today. Yours (anyone's) may differ. I'm happy to hear other points of view on this - I know what I think, but that doesn't mean I'm done thinking, yet. :) My opinions are just "place holders", keeping the space open till the actual truth shows up to stand there instead.